Storing Your Meals: Cooking in Advance
Freezing your foods can be a great way to store and prepare meals. You’ll also be saving yourself some time and money. In a culture where we are always on the go, it makes sense to plan our meals ahead of time. Most of us rarely find the time to cook a well-made, healthy meal. It can become very easy to pull up to your local fast food chain and grab a number four (extra bacon, please!) with a huge soda. So why not just plan and freeze your meals? You’ll be able to eat right and save yourself some time. Here are some examples of what you can freeze:
1) soups
2) chili
3) meatballs and meatloaf
4) refried beans
5) chicken nuggets
6) taco meat (this is a fast one!)
Handy Tips
1) You can freeze the soups in a spaghetti jar. Be sure to leave space in the jar, otherwise you’ll have yourself a broken jar.
2) Pack things into a pick-up-able freezer bag. You may need to freeze the food on a cookie shirt first.
This will keep you from having large, frozen clumps.
3) Put the pizza sauce in jars. You can also put the dough in a bag. Voila! Pizza!
4) You can use soups and casseroles in a freezer bag. By freezing them flat, you’ll earn yourself more freezer space.
Cooking a double batch of a meal and then freezing the remainder is gaining a double supply of food. You may lose out a little on taste-quality, but you’ll really gain in time and nutrition.
A Final Tip: Keep your freezer labeled with its contents. Marking the freezer bags is another good idea, because you can keep track of what you’ve got and how long it has been in there. You never know, without proper labeling, some meatballs may go unnoticed for years.
Source: Kitchen Stewardship
Image Source: Pretty Organized